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An Enterprise Scale Drupal Workflow

Traditionally Drupal workflows have focused on publishing individual nodes on the production site. Larger non media organisations often want to manage a collection of small content changes as a single job. The content of a job needs to be reviewed by multiple stakeholders before being published. In addition to nodes or entities, it is likely that blocks and other elements may need to be deployed as part of a job. This needs to be handled in a coordinated way.

Dave Hall will give an overview of the implementation of an enterprise Drupal workflow that he designed and implemented with Technocrat for Insurance Australia Group (IAG). IAG is one of the 50 largest companies in Australia and one of the biggest insurance companies in Australasia. IAG migrated their Direct Insurance website from Autonomy Teamsite to Drupal. The project involved building a workflow management system that implemented accepted best practices in terms of content and configuration management, but extended it to support a job centric, enterprise friendly workflow.

The workflow management system allows non developers and developers alike to manage jobs from the initial request through to production with minimal effort. Per job developer sandboxes can be built on demand and destroyed as needed. The workflow system primarily uses features, drush, deploy, git, Jenkins and a little PHP glue to hold it all together. At any time users can see where a particular job is at and if the requirements are met, move it to the next step in the process.

The IAG workflow system allows dozens, even hundreds, of changes to be tracked and deployed to various environments every week.